Field trials

The Prairie at The Barn, Serge Hill, Hertfordshire The home of Mr and Mrs Tom Stuart-Smith

- Non Morris

How feasible is it to grow a North American prairie in southern England? Non Morris finds out

SOWING a prairie is 'an act of terrifying alchemy' proclaims James Hitchmough, professor of Horticultural Ecology at Sheffield University and most famous, perhaps, for his role in designing the intoxicating rainbows of planting at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for the London 2012 Olympics. 'When you create a prairie, it's like throwing a pebble into a pond, the ripples come out, but you don't really know what eventually is going to happen.' This sense of a journey into the unknown attracted rather than deterred eminent landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, who asked Prof Hitchmough to help him create a North American Prairie at his own richly textured garden at Serge Hill, Hertfordshire.

'I had worked with James on a few similar projects and I wanted to do one for myself and learn, otherwise I was speaking from half experience.' Mr Stuart-Smith was drawn to the idea of creating a space that would sit easily within the gently shifting mosaic of his garden, with its wonderful rolling stretches of traditional wildflower meadow. At the height of summer, when the yellow sunflowerlike heads of Silphium laciniatum dance on 9ft of slender stem, the Prairie offers an intense dose of 'what evolutionary biologists call supernormal stimuli-the kind of heightened reaction that a blackbird might have to a cuckoo's egg appearing in her nest'.